Child Psychology Exam 2 Chapter 6 Cognitive Development 1 Know the key terms introduced in the beginning of the chapter Cognition is the inner process and products of the mind that lead to knowing It includes all mental activity attending remembering symbolizing categorizing planning reasoning problem solving creating and fantasizing Jean Piaget believed that we don t start out as cognitive beings and the mind adapts over time developing to fit with the world The constructivist approach is an approach that states one constructs virtually all knowledge about their world through their own activity like perceptual and motor activities There are four broad stages sensorimotor preoperational concrete operational and formal operational during which infants exploratory behaviors transform into the abstract logical intelligence of adolescence and adulthood Piaget s stage sequence has three important characteristics o The stages provide a general theory of development in which all aspects of cognition change in an integrated fashion following a similar course o The stages are invariant they always occur in a fixed order and no stage can be skipped o The stages are universal they are assumed to characterize children everywhere Schemes are organized ways of making sense of experience Adaptation is to build a scheme through direct interaction of environment o Assimilation uses current scheme to interpret the external world o In accommodation we create new scheme or adjust old ones after noticed that our current way of thinking does not capture the environment completely o Equilibration is the movement between equilibrium assimilate more and disequilibrium accommodate more Organization is a process that occurs internally apart from direct contact with the environment Once children from new schemes they rearrange them linking them with other schemes to create a strongly interconnected cognitive system 2 Sensorimotor stage The sensorimotor stage spans the first two years of life Its name reflects Piaget s belief that infants and toddlers think building schemes with their eyes ears hands and other sensorimotor equipment They cannot carry our many activities mentally but instead do circular reactions o Circular reaction provides a special means of adapting their first schemes It involves stumbling onto a new experience caused by the baby s own motor activity The reaction is circular because as the infant tries to repeat the event again and again a sensorimotor response that originally occurred by chance strengthens into a new scheme o Around 8 12 months babies engage in intentional or goal directed behavior coordinating schemes deliberately to solve simple problems Retrieving hidden objects is evidence that infant have begun to master object permanence Object permanence is the understanding that object continues to exist even when out of sight This awareness is not yet complete Babies still make the A not B search error If they reach several times for an object at one hiding place A then see it moved to another B they still search for it in the first hiding place A To discover what infants know about hidden objects and other aspects of physical reality researchers often use the violation of expectation method They may habituate babies to a physical event expose them to an event until their looking declines to familiarize them with a situation in which their knowledge will be tested Or they may simply show babies and expected event one that follows physical laws and an unexpected event a variation of the first event that violates the physical laws Heightened attention to the unexpected event suggests that the infant is surprised by a deviation from physical reality and therefore is aware of the aspect of the physical world However is not known if the method is conscious or unconscious After habituating to a short and tall carrot moving behind a screen babies were given two test events 1 an expected event in which the short carrot moved behind a screen could not be seen in its window and reappeared on the other side and 2 an unexpected event in which the tall carrot moved behind a screen could not be seen in its window and reappeared Infants as young as 2 5 to 3 5 looked longer at the unexpected event suggesting that they had some awareness that an object moved behind a screen would continue to exist o Mental Representation begins around 18 months Mental representations are the internal mental depictions of information through images of objects people places concepts like categories and can be manipulated with the mind One sign of this capacity is that 18 to 24 month olds arrive at solutions to problem suddenly rather than through trial and error behavior apparently experimenting with actions inside their heads Representations also enables older toddlers to solve advanced object permanence problems involving invisible displacement finding a toy moved while out of sight such as into a small box while under a cover Second it permits deferred imitation which is the ability to remember and copy the behavior of models that are not present And it makes possible make believe play in which children act out everyday and imaginary activities o To discover what infants know about hidden objects and other aspects of physical reality researchers often use the violation of expectation method They may habituate babies to a physical event expose them to the event until their looking declines to familiarize them with a situation in which their knowledge with be tested Or they may simply show babies an expected event one that follows physical laws and an unexpected event a variation of the first even that violates physical laws Heightened attention to the unexpected event suggests that the infant is surprised by a deviation from physical reality and therefore is aware of that aspect of the physical world o Even young infants can categorize grouping similar objects and events into a single representation an ability that is incompatible with a strictly sensorimotor approach to the world Categorization reduces the enormous amount of new information infants encounter every day helping them learn and remember Habituation has also been used to study infant categorization Researchers show babies a series of pictures belonging to one category and then see whether they recover to look longer at a picture that is not a member of the category Findings reveal that in the second half of the first year infants group objects
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